Eggs and Endorphins

The weekend (and Conflikt) was fun, but filled with incidence of nearly epic-FAIL (some of which was FAIL, just not epic).

First, I cut things finer than I liked, and arrived at the airport maybe 15 minutes before boarding. Still enough time to drop off my luggage, sit for a bit, then board, but...

Before the con, the only incidents of FAIL I remember (neither even nearly epic) was discovering the milk chocolate ganache (I made ganache of varying levels of cocoa -- from white chocolate ganache down to dark chocolate and slibowitz+dark chocolate...and then the remaining tiny habinero truffles from New Year's) hadn't quite melted, but a bit of time in the microwave reheating it did. Oh, and nobodys fault, but all the denizens of the Green Monster have recently or are sick (which is certainly FAIL).

For one reason or another, we didn't get to the con until later than we liked, but the company was fun, so again -- not even a little epic. At the con, there was some FAIL miscommunication result (oops) with pocketnaomi, but decidedly not epic. Also, unlike last year, I didn't break a tooth getting into the hotel, which I accord as a win.

At the con (in addition to lots of good music, socializing, eventually finding and rehearsing with my Instaband (and while not perfect, our Sunday performance was -not- a Fail), hugs, snuggles, etc, I discovered that I'd not completely closed the milk chocolate ganache container and it had proceeded to spill all over the inside of my backpack. OTOH, aside form an ultimately disposable pair of cheap headphones, the only thing -in- the bag were tuperware containers of chocolate -- so FAIL, but not EPIC FAIL.

My room was right next to the elevator on the second floor, which came in handy here, running back and forth from my room during (but mostly between) concerts to deal with messes. What was odd was that while my pattern was "leave at end of concert, take TOO LONG to deal with something in the room, come back", usually, Frank was just announcing the next performer just as I came in -- not fail at all, aside from busybusy.

One disappointment was that I vastly underestimated how much space I had left on my camera, and so didn't manage to take video of the 9 minute Earthquake Weather performance. (my camera apparently never reports more than 23 minutes of video left even when it has hours of -space- for video left -- FAIL). OTOH, I ran out of camera batteries during Seanan's GOH concert anyways (forgot to charge them nightly -- ooops), so just as well that I was rationing.

Merav pointed out, quite rightly and gently, that while I'd taken pains on two of the batches to use new plastic, to not touch it with anything not kosher, and to cook it in the microwave exlusively, I hadn't, you know, sealed it. Oops. Will have to do better next time (and buy some giant bars of chocolate directly from Barry Callebut, since their ten pound bars are A: really, really good, B, quite cheap per pound, and C: kosher and supervised by the OU).

I also discovered that while I'd brought lots of yummy soft chocolate (I didn't bother adjusting cream levels for different cocoa levels of ganache, as this was an Experiment, so liquidity was nearly purportional to lightness), I'd failed to purchase, well, you know, spoons? So the chocolate went uneaten for several days.

Sunday, before the Dead DogSmoked Salmon, I begged some spoons from the con suite, and pulled the chocolate out. Oddly, while I forgot to mention "oh, and the little balls are quite spicy truffles, proceed with caution", the few people who grabbed a lot of them before I could find space for a cautionary announcement seemed to appreciate, rather than dislike, the experience, so again, avoidance of EPIC FAIL (or any fail at all).

Most of it went, with a bit of the lighter fare left over as I sealed it before it vanishedvanished so pocketnaomi could hopefully have a taste when she had a taste for it, and a sliver of the dark and some of the spicy truffles left which I duly packed and brought home (or rather to work, which is where I am now).

Back at the Green Monster, there was some fail (my attempt at using their toolkit to extract a broken screw from Terpsichore (my 32 string Harpsicle) resulted in an extra hole and the extractor bit apparently couldn't purchase on the broken screw. Then my attempt to use the fresh hole and a drill to re-attach the sharping lever next to its original position and sink a new screw was indefinately interrrupted...when the -new- screwhead broke off and I was unable to extract the new screw either! Time to take the harp to -some- kind of professional.

Finally, it was time to go home. At which point, I promptly left my harp behind (remember the harp) and realized when packing the harp. Not to mention, despite playing on the computer for much of my idle time on Tuesday, I forgot to charge the battery-hungry G1 during the day, so it ran out of power on the flight. All that said, I got the airport, got on my flight with some time to spare, and got to NYC.

At which point, I took my own sweet time getting to pick up my checked luggage, and arrived half an hour after the plane landed to an empty carosel. Eep! I asked the two guys by the carosel what I should do (assuming someone had probably taken my luggage away when it wasn't picked up promptly, wandered where they told me to, found that the baggage ladies couldn't find my duffel in the computer (uh-oh), was told that this happened a lot when they had weight issues on the plane and told to fill out a form, wondered how bad it would really be it my bag were lost (pretty bad; it had my keys, my metrocard, really cool CDs, my work ID, etc), realized that it almost certainly -wasn't- a weight issue; the plane was over half empty; went around looking dejectedly at random people's luggage to see if the luggage thief was still there, and finally realizing it would Truly Suck if it were really gone, wandered back to the carousel to ask if they'd seen anything.

At which point, a woman (who hadn't been there before) said "Green bag?" <nods> "Duffel?" <nods, understanding dawning> "Go to <office completely different from the one the men had pointed me at>". Where, of course, was sitting My Bag. Yay! EPIC FAIL averted once more! (When I asked Office ! about it, they were happy that I'd found it by unapoligetic, saying that the other office must not have entered it into the system)

Clearly, I fell into a classic race condition (only, you know, at meat speeds). While I was inquiring about my bag, it was presumably either being conveyed to a different location or the process that did was cleaning up and hadn't delivered its info somewhere that was queryable. Meanwhile, when I queried Office 1, Office 2 had only recently received my bag and hadn't entered it into the system -- thus I'd raced away my information (and lost). However, when I swung back and began the same query sequence again, the race condition was over, and I managed to get my data (which is, after all, why polling is a reasonable, if inelegant and untrustworthy, solution to many race conditions).

The discomfort of the train trip back and the 21 degree whether I was totally unprepared for (even packed away my gloves when searching for something) paled in comparison. So did a day of work with only a few minutes of sleep (between starting and Flora Segunda, which I quite enjoyed; there are some advantages to not having a working phone) on the plane.